


As Long as Hope Leaves the Least Bit of Green.

by anotherjuxtaposition (furies)



Category: Divine Comedy - Dante
Genre: Gen, Yuletide2009, book-fic, first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:41:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furies/pseuds/anotherjuxtaposition
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beatrice is her own religion to some, but everyone forgets to ask about Beatrice herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Long as Hope Leaves the Least Bit of Green.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atheilen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/gifts).



> Many translations were used to help refresh my memory in writing this, but these were with me at all times: Mandelbaum's Inferno, Merwin's Purgatorio, Birk and Saunder's Paradiso, and Charles Eliot Norton's complete translation of the Divine Comedy. If you haven't had a chance to look at Birk and Saunder's work, I highly recommend it - they make Dante modern by writing in our vernacular, and show once again the relevance of Dante to basically everything.

We laid eyes on each other once, twice, and now, centuries later, my name is known. Before Shakespeare decided to write sonnets to his love (or her love – some stories are best left for you to discover on your own – or perhaps not at all), the poet that claimed me for himself wrote terribly impressive poetry about a man lost.

 

Of course, that story has been told a thousand times before, and will be told again, from Odysseus to Tolkien, Lewis to Hemingway. Men are lost, and women remain: behind, as inspiration, as guides and temptresses. To be honest, I wish my story had been more of the latter, but the poet who chose me was also fighting for his own soul. Of course I had to be placed in the highest echelon of his heavens.

 

But I will tell you the truth: I was a young woman, living in Florence. Aligheri was but a young thing; even so, I remember being startled by his eye. He possessed a twinkling of self-confidence that was rare in young children then, much like adolescents of today. He caught my eye, and I looked at him. But I was a girl of eight, and already promised to another, older, man. Even if I hadn’t been, I was pleasant enough to have been married off to another suitable Florentine, while Dante was promised at age 12 to another woman, to Gemma Donnati. There are many things which make me question Dante’s proclaimed love for me, but perhaps that is what makes me think he liked the idea of me more than he ever liked me as a person. He never called me ‘Bice’, which I was far more comfortable with. That he never saw that reality always struck me as peculiar. I must also remember that he was a poet, and the eye of the poet is not always primed to see truth, but instead, beauty.

 

I left the party and did not see him again for years. I did not dream of him. I did not pray to any gods or goddesses, or Mary or the Father himself. I accepted what became my life. It was easy, it was full of springs and summers of glorious color. My only complaint could be that I was not allowed to enjoy my mortal life any longer. Sometimes, in my more petty moments, I think that Dante must claim responsibility for my death. He had been promised to Gemma but still claimed his heart belonged to me (as if I ever knew!). He dreamt of  me, sleeping in the Lord’s arms, and eating his own heart. The symbolism of such an act is almost too obvious for what I would expect from whom we now call “Italy’s Poet”, but this was an early work, and Dante always did have a penchant for the dramatic.

 

I ask myself if he could have written all he did if I were alive. Dante already created enough scandal to get himself exiled from his beloved city, and while all Italian men are prone to falling instantly and transformatively in love with one glance, committing that fact to paper and exalting it is an entirely different story.

 

More to the point, he really had no right. I was married, as was he. To ask if his love was requited is quite beyond reason. It doesn’t matter. I did him a favor, though I did not know it then, and died young at 24. I did not see him again. It has been so long I cannot recall truthfully whether this bothered me. He was busy developing what is now called courtly love, and I only know that as I was dying, I wished to be alone. I wished it to be over. Death in the 13th century is not something Hollywood would come ringing for.

 

And then there is the issue of Dante’s _Inferno_. How even the title sparks the modern imagination, how he did have such a way with words – _lasciate ogne speranzam, voi ch’intrate _ – Abandon every hope, all who enter here! (That phrase, despite multiple translations, always stays the same. That fact resonates within me with something like I would imagine maternal pride.) Dante’s vision of hell is a spectacular creation, the numerology only strengthening an already vivid nightmare of external existence. And to borrow the phrase “let the punishment fit the crime” – the Poet learned well from the Greeks and Hades, having the fortune-tellers walk backwards on their head. The lustful tied together in a hell of passion’s wind! What hilarious perfection!

 

I must admit that while I do not agree with all his placements, I am amused to see people from my own time put in the afterlife in such a calculated manner. Those that helped Dante found themselves in Paradise, those that hindered him were in Hell. Yes, he was full of pride, no doubt. But pride is necessary for a writer conceiving of an entire theological belief system into words. Of course, there are things for which there are no words, and to his credit, he does not try to find them. He admits they are beyond his capable hands, even with the Muses and Apollo helping him.

 

Have you ever played the game of _Inferno_? Perhaps I made it up myself, having been so central to the _Commedia_ and dead for so many years. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it. Simply take Dante’s own _Inferno_, with its nine rings and division of sins, and contemporize it. Sometimes it gets difficult, such as when people are guilty of many sins, but mostly it’s sometimes fun to get a chuckle out of imagining, say, Pope Pious XII stuck in the ninth circle, either fully frozen in a horrible position, or being gnawed on in the mouth of a bloody, sobbing Satan. You write from the 21st century – who would you place in the circles of hell? Leaders who failed to act when acting was obvious? Childhood bullies? Unreasonable critics? Those that do not believe in your values? Liars? Traitors? Consider what some would call “obvious villains”: Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Tito - and would you put them in the fourth, seventh or ninth circle? After all, isn’t the whole conceit subjective? To some, they are traitors, to others, simply greedy, and yet no one can contest they have created violence. Or, perhaps, you might even place one of them in your Paradise. Or what about others  – Austria’s Haider, Eva Peron, Imedla Marcos, Franco, my own Mussolini, Rasputin, maybe even Anne Boyelyn?

 

And then the debate about whether they even belong in a circle of Hell: Captain Cook, any recent American president (including Frankling Roosevelt), Margaret Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, the Ayatollahs, Kublai Khan, Oliver Cromwell, the early French Revolutionaries, Lenin, Trotsky, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Martin Luther, and so on? You soon learn that one man’s Judas Iscariot is another’s Saint Peter, one in the mouth of Lucifer, and one with the keys to God's own front yard.

 

That is the genius and the glory of the game, for rarely do any creations look the same. And yet, Dante’s subjective vision, full of vengeful thoughts and wrathful words, has sustained itself. We all know someone like Cassius, like Francesca, like the Bishop of Florence and the anonymous Florentine suicide. In our most base moments, do we not curse, “Go rot in Hell?” How simple that would be if Hell was only one place! But nine rings with divisions inside each ring, punishments fitting the crime in every case – we have all played the game, whether we admit it or not. Our own punishments are substituted to fit the perceived crimes of our acquaintances. Believe me when I say this game can make decades pass in a moment. Of course, there is always constant revision, as the universe is full of sinners that have some place in Dante’s three worlds of the afterlife, even if they are assigned to Purgatory or Paradise. What level then?

 

To get back to your question, there is his _Paradisio_ to consider also. I remained innocent and perfect to him, the glance he caught of me when I was nine and behaving as a young girl should at a party. He did not know that I used to slip out of mother’s house at night, leaving my shoes on the sill, to run through the streets barefoot. I had no destination planned, but simply yearned for moments when properness didn’t manner, and I could feel the wind in my hair and the ground on my feet without anyone exclaiming around me. He did not know that I secretly longed to know all there was to know, that I sometimes wished I was a boy, that I rarely sat in prayer when no one was watching, and when I did pray, it was to ask the Heavenly Father to spare me having children. Dante did not know I sometimes wished we still had the ancient gods of Italy, the Roman mythology with its fantastic tales. He saw me as he wanted: a girl in a white dress, as pure as freshly picked cotton, head bowed in silent contemplation of the glory of the good, Roman Catholic God.

 

It is embarrassing to consider how high the pedestal he put me on was. To think that I sat with Mary, Lucy and Rachel! (Some men believe Leah was there, as well as Elizabeth, but putting me in Heaven was quite enough. To have me sitting with the holiest of women is frankly laughable.) When I look back on his work, I prefer to stay away from _Paradiso_. I have not grown more lovely in my death, whether you believe I am in Heaven or not. I do find it amusing though that for all his exclamations about me, Dante never claimed I was physically beautiful. For a time I thought that quite rude, but it is not easy for me to retain such petty thoughts, whether I think I was lovely or not. Regardless, beauty is subjective. I look at the women who are revered as gorgeous in today’s world and think how far we have come to rejoice in a body that does not look as if it could carry babies and nurse them to health. I suppose the real point for me is that society has evolved so that if I were born today, there’s a good chance I would not have died at 24. I would have been allowed to speak to Dante along the street instead of merely looking at him when we happened to pass.

 

Alas, I was born into the time I was. If I were born now, this letter would not be addressed to me, for it is precisely because of Dante and his poetry that I am remembered and considered important. Yet let me once again stress the genius of the Poet – not only did he grasp language in a way that is remarkable still, but he knew of science and politics. Putting the mountain of Purgatory in the Southern Hemisphere – and this is centuries before the world became round in common knowledge. Knowing the succession of the planets, at least as far as he did, and his understanding of orbits and stars. His grasp of theology is clear, his obsession with the numbers three and nine and his ability to work them into the poem in such a consistent and understandable way is just one illustration of his unique and thorough gift. His devoted political work caused his exile from Florence, the city he loved more than any other, and then sent him far from home on missions for his benefactors, away from his family and his homeland of Italy. Add to that the fact that he is the one that created “Italian” the language as we know it, and you can not contest the genius of Dante, even if you disagree with his theological conclusions. (The French call Italian _la langue de dante_ as an affectionate nickname, and you must know, the French are not particularly affectionate to anything not French.)

 

Thinking of Dante in this way, I must consider about how it was for Gemma to be left at home with the children. I always wondered how Gemma received his work. I almost expected him to publish the _Commedia_ in proper Latin, but his inner ego won out, wanting everyone in Florence, everyone, to know what a talent he possessed. How wrong they were for exiling him, what a genius talent they let go. So I must imagine that Gemma heard the story herself, if she did not read it. I presume he told her that he loved her, that I was just a metaphor. Or that he needed someone already dead, (despite starting _La Vita Nuovo_ before my death), or he could not even bear to think of his life with his dear wife dead. Men in those days, much like in these days, were apt liars when it came to women and love. Perhaps for him it wasn’t even a lie. When one possesses an imagination so bold as his, it is easy to see how he could convince himself whatever he said was true. And while I feel for her, and feel ashamed about my role in their marriage – or, at least, her husband’s work – I have never once tried to find out what became of her.

 

Men are not the only sex with the gift of lying convincingly to themselves.

 

I do know his daughter entered the orders for women and became Sister Beatrice. What effect that had on her mother, I cannot say. I only hope that she forgives me for Dante’s blinding insistence believing I was Holy and his own Savior, but I cannot determine whether I, in Gemma’s position, would be able to forgive myself. Perhaps if it was only Dante that thought of me, but for her daughter, her Antonia, to leave her mother and take my name as well? When I do think of Gemma, and I take myself out of the story, I realize that I don't want to know what became of her, really, for if she was unhappy I prefer not to think of it. Even now, I do not fully accept that I had a role in their marriage; I was only spotted by Dante once, and then, as they say, the rest is history. I had no agency in this story, or so I tell myself in the dead of night.

 

(I will confess my most devout and hidden heart's desire is that Dante did in fact love Gemma, and loved her well for the woman she was, and not the woman she wasn’t. I hope he told often and much how lucky he was, how she fulfilled him, how she was his home when Florence was taken away. That he could not do the work he did without her. Yet, knowing the countenance of Italian men, I am afraid she may have never heard those things. Still, I hope she knew it, in her heart, even without the words her husband saved for so many others.)

 

The point of this is not to lecture you, or pass judgment on anyone, myself included. It is not to tell you that Heaven exists, that hell neither is nor isn’t as the poet described. In my experience, faith is measured by what you cannot see and trust in anyway, by believing what may be neither rational nor logical, but something that is simply _felt_. Many men have attempted to use reason to prove or disprove the existence of God, and if you are so inclined, I was most entertained by the “proofs” described by Aquinas, Kant, and Feurbach, though Kirkegaard is always good in a pinch. In the end, no matter how much you read, or how much you see, you must trust me on this (yes, have faith in this): you can never truly know. And in not knowing, you have the miracle of faith.

 

I do not know if this answers your question: Did Dante get it right? After all, what part are you referring to? The theology, the science, the placement of persons, the people in Paradise? Does God in the Roman Catholic understanding even exist? Did I love him? I ask you to forgive me, for I have lived a great many years in silence, and even so, it appears there are questions I either cannot answer, or choose to ignore.

The poem stands, and a poem it is. Authors take liberties not afforded mathematicians. There are a great many things I still do not know, and still do not understand. That fact delights me, for it means I shall never be bored. If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to enjoy mortal life while you can, live true to yourself, and always ask yourself what you can learn.

 

Dante never tried to be anything other than he was. He never returned to Florence because of that. It is that strength of character that I choose to support. His _Commedia_ is a masterful work of poetry, politics, philosophy and . . . oh, I cannot think of another word that begins with “p”. Persuasion? He would know.

 

So I end this with a question for you to consider: what do you yourself believe? And do you believe it with the same conviction that Dante himself believed? For understand that to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself. Dante believed in himself, and that, I can say without doubt, is what Dante got right, if nothing else.

 

When you discover your answer, I would gladly hear it, if you were so inclined.

 

With all my regards, and fondness,

 

Beatrice di Folco Portinari.


End file.
